Australia’s Intelsat-Hosted IS-22 Satellite

(click to visit) Intelsat is a commercial satellite provider, who launches and maintains global coverage for its customers with over 50 satellites. One interesting wrinkle is a program that lets customers pay to host partial or full payloads on Intelsat’s birds, locking in recurring service revenues and defraying the cost of deployment. Australia is a US military partner for the Wideband Global SATCOM program, buying WGS-6 and gaining access to the constellation’s services under Joint Project 2008, Phase 4. In April 2009, a decision was made to add a partial communications payload on Intelsat’s IS-22 UHF satellite, under JP 2008, Phase 5A. That is now a full UHF payload, under a revised contract – and the USA will benefit, as well… Intelsat’s IS-22 Boeing 702(click to view full) Intelsat’s IS-22 UHF will be positioned at 72° East longitude to cover the Indian Ocean Region, an area of obvious interest to Australia, and to the USA as well. Intelsat plans to launch it in Q1 2012. The satellite, to be built by Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems, will be based on a Boeing 702B bus. The 702 bus is also used by the WGS constellation. IS-22 will have 48 C-band and […]